Matthew Sawyer’s Pazuzu Trilogy – The Wasted Revision

My Pazuzu Trilogy is a millennially unique, blasphemous, scrubbed-til-Sunday epic. The Eighth Revision was the first pass in which I did not make major changes – I found typos and a few obtuse sentences, but other than those, the changes are smattering instances of migrating blocks of text into dialogue. The following four revisions were then experiments with character names and locations. So yeah, the current and last revision is the Twelfth. It’s called the Wasted Revision. This last rewrite is dedicated to my pseudonym, Mr. Binger, the author of the two-volume hardcover edition of the Eleventh revision re-entitled The Waste.

* Mr. Binger has also recently self-published his weird and visceral horror stories Unction and Our Lord Weathercock. Pocketbooks available at LULU.

I hope readers enjoy the free ebook version of Manifestation – the first installment of the trilogy. And I’d like them to tell everyone they know and buy the second and third book. Manifestation is mostly background. It’s where I introduce the consequences of a godless world. Emergence is when the narrative grows teeth and nails. Here is where Pazuzu is revealed and my alien gods find this feckless demon.

Pazuzu (pahzoo’zoo) – king of demons in Assyrian mythology.

Manifestation (manufe’steyshun) – indication of the presence of a person or thing.

PAZUZU – MANIFESTATION is the first book in the Pazuzu Trilogy. This book introduces the godless world of the Shur desert and the sorrowful sinners therein. Readers follow a pair of UnChosen wretches as they flee for their lives from a crime lord in the city of Gomorrah. A stranger joins the Cortras brothers, but he doesn’t tell them about the voice following him. The wanderer doesn’t know the voice is Pazuzu. In fact, the demon reminds him his name is Ben. This man suffering amnesia carries salvation and damnation from the desert.

Download a free ebook version of Pazuzu – Manifestation (The Wasted Revision), the first book in the Pazuzu Trilogy by Matthew Sawyer. Get it from Smashwords!

Emergence (i’merjuns) – gradual coming out as a result of something.

PAZUZU – EMERGENCE is the second book in Matthew Sawyer’s Pazuzu Trilogy. This book continues the bleak tale begun in Pazuzu – Manifestation.

Horror comes to the battered squatters at Saint Erasmus once the demon, Pazuzu, finds a host. Lost in the chaos, Hen Cortras is taken prisoner and followed into the Shur desert, where he meets heathens – nomadic terrorists who crusade against the Chosen’s Church and military.

Ebook Sample from Smashwords

Abeyance (u’beyuns) – suspension.

PAZUZU – ABEYANCE is the last book in Matthew Sawyer’s Pazuzu Trilogy. The last book follows the demon, Pazuzu, in the shadow of the Promised Land’s destruction.

Achieving its goal, Pazuzu has claimed a human body. The demon steals the frame of a boy and makes the mother a missionary. Before the old mother dies, she proclaims her demon-possessed son is the messiah – the reincarnation of the Chosen’s eviscerated Mortal God. Meanwhile, the younger Cortras brother is arrested and beaten by the Chosen’s military and sent to a detention camp outside Capital.

At the camp, Hen Cortras meets real-life heathens. The prisoners escape the Chosen’s military and Hen joins their march against the Chosen’s Promised Land. The heathen attack has already begun behind the monumental Wall and Khetam burns. Pazuzu and Benedict Gage, his heathen minister, now cross the fires of Capital in search of the flock gathered by the mother of the possessed boy. The alien gods are now aware of the demon moving through the world and they send monsters.

Ebook Sample from Smashwords

Matthew Sawyer’s Bio: A few words concerning myself.

About me … I don’t have any awards – not even an honorable mention. Heck, I didn’t even go to school to become a Writer – I was going to be a Fine Art Painter. Yet I had to pay my student loans. After college, I worked in Mental Health – as in schizophrenics and other assortment of severe mental disorders. All the while, I painted and sketched – and wrote stories. In that time, I speculated the story I really wanted to conjure – years of drawing monsters had spun my own mythology and I hoped for something comparable and real.

The narrative I wanted to create would fulfill a fading desire and breathe life into the chimeras I had drawn in my notebooks. That visual mythology had been collectively called “The Mortui Philosophies.” I tried animation, but the repetitive work only produced frustration. So much in fact, I joined the ‘sane’ world and switched careers into Internet Technology. Secure, I had stopped painting and focused on a very rewarding career. After a few years lacking expression from my creative self, my Pazuzu Trilogy took its first breath.

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Purchase Pazuzu Trilogy Pocket books and Hardcovers at LULU.

Gaunt Rainbow – Sixth Revision

Revision Pending

In consequence to the changes I’ve made to names and the setting in my Pazuzu Trilogy, I am forced to revisit Gaunt Rainbow. She’s a progeny of the trilogy. I don’t feel it’s appropriate to call Gaunt Rainbow a sequel, but rather a continuation of the bleak horror woven within the Shur desert. The story is also more mainstream with a genuine hero – a female protagonist – and a traditional tale about personal relationships. Of course, it’s twisted because the narrative unfolds in the post holy war Shur and alien gods still consume its dead. Nevertheless, those details are secondary. Gaunt Rainbow is Pamela’s story.

The sixth revision isn’t yet finished. I hope it’s complete by the second week in November. Whereas reading the Pazuzu Trilogy isn’t necessary to enjoy Gaunt Rainbow, having read the epic does make its progeny richer – and savvy readers will appreciate the irony of my choice of words used in this self review, I hope.

The fifth revision is still available but honestly, I don’t know what I was thinking. The second chapter is especially hairy – with Pamela’s recollection of a death dream that shatters grammatical tense beyond my typical amateurish pummeling. I’m working on that, you critics. Be kind – heck, be supportive – I am getting better. That’s why there have been so many rewrites. I’m teaching myself because Lord knows, I’m not getting any help. Then again, my horror stories all revolve around the premise there is no God. And if I was a superstitious man, I’d say it’s why my whole fruitless effort toward becoming a published author is cursed.

Hang in there all you faithful readers, wherever and whomever you may be. We’ll all eventually get fed. And when I’m rich and famous, we’ll escape the waste. And we won’t continue trips back to my fictionalized hometown. That place is hardly better than my hopeless desert dystopia.

All of Yesterday

Tempered by all of yesterday
And knowing now what I have seen,
I stand and face this creation;
This yellow thing with no bottom.

From atop my fragile cliff face,
Me tottering, feeling dizzy,
I witness gargantuan death
Wrought of steel and plastic.

We made this bare monstrosity.
Shorn circuits have imparted life.
An accident, scientists say.
An evil, my dead team mates cry.

Alone, I face this behemoth.
This Moloch driven by rank fire,
Burning human, blood, bone and souls.
Unstopped, I know it’s eternal.

And now I face my very end.
For I will descend into Hell.
And rip out a mechanic heart.
My death for all humanity.

For only I must perish here.
No more men and women will die.
A compensation for evil
I helped birth into this dead world.

- Matthew Sawyer

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Christianity – A Curse of the 21st Century

“Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s…”

Matthew 22:21

That stumped paraphrase there is the root of late America’s greed and inequality. Sure, Christianity has been and often is a source of Good. In fact, Jesus is credited for garnering the cooperation of the early Christian cult with all-powerful Rome. Memory of the figurehead is said to have preserved His followers through trials and tribulation severe as many faithful having been tossed to mad lions for the pleasure of sadistic pagans. The verse made those sorry folk meek and compliant. But modern readers must know, that particular gospel is a work of embellished fiction. It is no more real than the story of Noah’s deluge or even the quickness of all Creation.

The gospel of Matthew is not more than the original, predictive Jeffersonian version of the gospel of Mark – those two others, John and Luke, are also. Some long-dead Gnostic or band of exponents had added the magical components of a virgin birth and resurrection to the stories they had conveyed word-of-mouth. He, she or they had been forced to include fairytales in hopes of gathering and retaining an attentive audience.

Back in the Iron Age, Christianity had faced competition with hordes of other gods  – Mithra, especially. Mithra was the Zoroastrian deity popular with the unparalleled Roman military. Stretching the comparison, he and Jesus Christ share similar origins, lifetimes and fates. Rumor suggests the mistaken sign of this Persian divinity had compelled Constantine to convert his Tuscan civilization wholesale to Christendom. And as had Rome, Western civilization followed his dictated model. Back then, it had been easy to impose upon barbarians whom lacked the advanced technology of the smithed sword. Christianity then kept them inert and at the mercy of a more advanced culture – one of who’s power grew with wealth.

For the curious, Constantine is said to have prayed and witnessed the ankh-like Chi Rho in a sunny sky during a critical episode of stress. His efficient and then-modern armies then prevailed in the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, 312 AD. Constantine then spontaneously converted to the blind worship of Christ. And like many signs and holidays, Christians later adopted the symbol of the Chi Rho into its own religion.

Yet the argument does not concern Mithra. Rather, the etymology of the Bible and Roman sentiment is responsible for America’s dire consequence. Another popular phrase corrupts the Biblical verse. That is “A Man’s Home is his Castle.” The perspective also dates back to the Roman era. Alas, colonial and industrial America had been obsessed with all things of the period and that phrase, too, perseveres.

Always the nature of the human male, every man considers himself a king of his household. His household includes everything he owns… his horse, his car, his business, etc. And yet again at risk of promoting Socialism, here is the incorrect perspective – the sin. The phrase promotes selfishness and, worst, righteous ego. The transgression is not so much suffered among the underclass, but the owners of the United States.

The richest Americans own ninety percent of American wealth. These people constitute no more than one percent of all citizens – of everyone living in the USA including those with no where else to go and without assets to take them no place. Expanding the vision of people considered wealthiest, the top twenty percent own forty percent of the assets once belonging to public of the Land of the Free. And each of these billionaires have grander visions.

Many of the uber-wealthy consider themselves greater than kings. Uncontested and unassailable, they believe themselves Roman emperors. This sliver of the one percent think themselves as gods and they demand tithing and the worship from mortal beings. Why? To compete with themselves. They need no more. But as gods do, they play games with each other so that one may claim monetary superiority within their omnipotent modern pantheon.

And as powerful mortals, they become as the Antichrist. They exploit scripture and quote to themselves “Render therefore unto Caesar all.” They say so because there simply isn’t much yet much available in this physical world. Here is the Hell they have humanity suffer at their whim. And theirs is the scripture the rest of us are expected to uphold. Law demands acquiescence. And if the Word is not enough, they have the assets to rain down upon us the impersonal wraith of military science. Here is where the fable of Christianity has brought us. And now we know, there is no God to save the masses of the human race.

As the Founding Fathers of America have given us, there is only Democracy. But unlike Justice, Democracy must not be blind. Knowledgeable application is crucial or our freedom, too, or that will also be corrupted by money. All humanity must see outside personal possessions. Raise up the underprivileged with education, food, shelter and medical care. Uphold the principles that truly make us great and not just guarded and afraid because the fact we ourselves still wield swords.